Our office conducted a mini experiment (not an experiment that would be legally defensible in court but a test to get an idea) we took a bowl that tested positive for lead glaze. We placed coffee in the bowl overnight. We sent the coffee to our laboratory (licensed lab) to see if the lead leached into the coffee. The coffee came back higher than legal levels of lead in water. SO it can leach into food if left in the bowl too long (coffee is acidic and we assumed that’s why it leached into the coffee from the bowl).

I’ll quickly mention three other sources of lead in pets that literally scares the hell out of me. We see the first two all the time in my job. Dogs left on porches who chew on window and door trim painted with lead paint. Generally in homes built before 1930ish contain the highest levels of lead. It’s not the top several layers of paint but the first few - generally the dogs chew all the way to the wood so they are ingesting the lead in the paint too.

Second, cats who sit in window wells! When your cat sits in an old window well it can collect lead dust on its fur…licking itself clean will lead to lead poisoing…but also the cat can track lead dust throughout the home poisoning children.

I have also spoke with a representative of Niton (the company that makes lead testing XRF machines). Lead is still put in dog toys unfortunatley I am not sure which ones. Generally lead is found in vinyl products (think vinyl mini blinds or those toy dinasaurs) basically plastic products that are mallable (I’m fearful that the KONG toys will contain lead). Someday I hope that our office can purchase an XRF machine that tests plastic products ($45,000 so I’m not holding my breath) our current machine tests paint.

Actually, illiterate people are a wonderful source of cheap labor and make far better slaves than those trained to use their minds to think and reason.

Straybaby, I’ve wonderd too, about the cumulative effect.

Don, I remember those old toothpaste tubes too! And, I think you may have hit upon something…our brains messed up by corporate media…exactly what they want control.

Just this past Sat. on Fox News during the AM business segment the discussion was: decrease the amount of homework and hours kids put into classwork because… it would help the economics of this country. How; the kids would have more time to shop and consume.

Katie

how is this any different than a kid having a toy box full of toys that are mildly tainted with lead/heavy metals? isn’t it just a slower form of poisoning?

Don, I remember those old toothpaste tubes! OY!!

Coincident with the silient switch to plastic toothpaste tubes was a national campaign to remove lead from paint, based on the cannard that kids eat so many paint chips they eventually suffer from the toxic effects of lead poisoning.

So, let’s take the dog dish with 1 part per 1000 lead in the ceramic surface coating. If the bowl is about 8 inches around, there’s about 50 square inches of top surface to be coated. If the coating is 1/100 of an inch thick, you’d have half a cubic inch of total coating. A rough estimate of 5 grams of coating would give you a total of 5 mg of lead, if one were silly enough to break up the dish, remove the coating, grind it to a fine powder, and eat it. At that, I doubt a nonporous substance such as ceramic is likely to release much lead.

There’s probably more lead in the water going into the dish than lead that could be released by the dish itself.

According to this Wiki article, there were 13.5 million children with elevated lead levels in 1978 (about the time use of lead toothpaste tubes was discontinued), which has since dropped by 98%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning

If folks are concerned about things likely to destroy their brains, a good place to start is the stuff fed to us by a corporate media, sponsored by corporate advertisers, that not once in three decades has ever mentioned leaded toothpaste as the source of lead poisoning in over 13 million children.

The KOAT article points out Melloy recommends consumers use steel bowls or high impact plastic bowls instead.

While I am no expert, I am using stable, non-tipping glass bowls such as Pyrex for our cat. And I’d avoid the steel bowls that presently have the very nasty smelling rubberized no-skid bottoms which I see in the major pet stores. Those apparently have some kind of chemical in them that smells bad even to humans. With dog’s and cat’s noses being MANY times more sensitive than ours, that must be a repugnant smell to them!! And we expect them to EAT from a bowl that smells like that? Stainless steel bowl, no rubber foot, not made in China. Or glass, or some kind of plastic that isn’t melamine based.

And if it is a dog who might break a glass bowl, then I’d not use glass, unless it was securely fastened in some kind of heavy holder on the floor.

I wonder if it’s possible for the lead to leach into water or food over a period of time? I’m always suspicious of those pet bowls at the pet store and won’t buy them. My animals eat off of dishes (and drink out of bowls) intended for human use only. Not that that’s any guarantee of lead-free safety these days, but you do what you can…